Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/17

 white horse gazed at him wonderingly. Truly these humans were strange beings to find matter for laughter on such a day.

Yes, his relatives were eccentric enough to think him mad. There was Aunt Caroline, for instance, who rather prided herself upon being different from other people; yet she had married a peer; was extremely wealthy, and as exclusive as a colony of Agapemones. No one could say that she had been discouraged.

The thought of Caroline, Lady Drewitt, brought Beresford back to his present situation, and the cause of his struggling along a country road in the face of a south-westerly wind, that threw the rain against his face in vicious little slaps, on the most pitifully unspring-like first of May he ever remembered. Again, the day brought him back to his starting point: "Nature discourages eccentricity." In short, Lady Drewitt, the weather and the phrase all seemed so mixed up and confused as to defy entire disentanglement.

The weather could be dismissed in a few words. It was atrocious, depressing, English. Ahead stretched the rain-soddened high-road, flanked on either side by glistening hedges, from which the water fell in solemn and reluctant drops. Heavy clouds swung their moody way across the sky, just clearing the tree-tops. Groups of miserable cattle huddled together under hedges, or beneath trees that gave no shelter from the pitiless rain. Here and there some despairing beast lay down in the